SIMULTANEOUSLY QUALITY AND POPULAR?: LAYERED POLYSEMY AND NOSTALGIC - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

SIMULTANEOUSLY ‘QUALITY’ AND ‘POPULAR’?: LAYERED POLYSEMY AND NOSTALGIC DISCOURSES IN DOCTOR WHO (BBC 2005- )

ROSS P. GARNER DEPARTMENT OF JOURNALISM, MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

‘QUALITY POPULAR’ TELEVISION AND STRUCTURED POLYSEMY

• Nelson (2007: 174-9) on ‘quality popular’ television drama:
• Drawn from industrial discourses circulating in British television – ITV.
• Extends to include ‘mainstream’ broadcasters – e.g. BBC One.
• ‘Quality’ signifiers:
• Production values.
• Generic hybridity.
• Construction of author-function.
• ‘Popular’ signifiers:
• “the relative predictability of TV genres” (175)
• Structured polysemy - “all meanings do not exist ‘equally’ in the message: it has been structured in dominance, despite the

impossibility of a ‘total closure’ of meaning …the ‘preferred reading’ is itself part of the message, can be identified within its linguistic and communicative structure.” (Morley 1995: 301)

‘QUALITY POPULAR’: INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY?

• Case study: Jenny’s death scene from ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ (2008).
• RTD era Who and discourses of nostalgia:
• Post-2005 Doctor Who is “about time travel imprinted by loss” (Hills 2010a: 210)
• Burling (2006: 8) – the “temporal contrast” time travel narrative.
• ‘Personal nostalgia’ – arises from the combination of ‘time travel’ and ‘soap drama’ (Creeber 2004) elements

(see also Hills 2010b).

‘QUALITY POPULAR’: INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY?

‘QUALITY POPULAR’: INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY?

‘Popular’ Conventions

• Accentuation and foregrounding of emotional

content.

• Deployment of ‘soap opera’ aesthetics – e.g.

movement to the close-up.

• Melodramatic performance codes.
• “blaring music” (Feuer 1995: 116).

‘Quality’ Conventions

• Smith (2006: 89) – “good television distinguishes

itself not by rejecting the practices of ordinary television but by using elegantly efficient instances of standard techniques.”

• Pearson (1992: 55) – “verisimilar codes”
• Music – Murray Gold’s ‘Gallifrey’ theme:
• “a sense of stylistic integrity, in which themes

and style are intertwined in an expressive and impressive way” (Cardwell 2007: 26).

DISCUSSION

• Singular ‘quality popular’ reading position unattainable.
• ‘Layered polysemy’:
• Arises from necessities of the production context.
• Offering incongruous, yet co-existing, preferred reading positions.
• Agreeing with Morley (1995) – need to retain textualist focus.
• Layered polysemy sits alongside, but differs from, existing TV Studies positions:
• Ross (2008: 20-6) – ‘aesthetics of multiplicity’.
• Johnson (2012: 160-5) – branding and paratextuality.
• Post-structuralist avoidances of ‘the text’ as producer of meaning – e.g. McKee (2003), Sandvoss (2005).

CONTACT DETAILS

• Email: GarnerRP1@Cardiff.ac.uk
• Twitter: @DefConG
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